Barrett Fuller's Secret

by Scott Carter

  This research is often confusing and overwhelming, but the pursuit is soothing, and the more he learns, the more he wants to learn.

  Every time he reads a chapter about gay bashing or watches a show starring a gay character or looks at pictures of two men kissing in a magazine, he hopes to feel closer to understanding why his father left. To discover a clue or a possible reason for the motivation. But that never happens. All he knows for certain after all this net surfing, reading, and looking at pictures, is that he feels more distant from his father’s motivation than ever.

  Even pinning down a definition for gay is complex. What he knows is this: kids at school, like the one that wrote the graffiti in the washroom, make fun of gay people by using lisps or holding their wrists limp, and many TV shows he watched before implied that gay people were weak and weird, but it isn’t that simple. His soccer coach told everyone he was gay, and he is as muscular as a body builder and talks with the deepest voice Richard has ever heard. This is not a man who is weak or weird. Maybe Richard’s father is bisexual. He saw a movie one night a month ago about a man that had both a boyfriend and a girlfriend. The man referred to himself as bisexual, and as far as Richard can tell, his father enjoyed kissing his mother as much as he enjoyed kissing the blond man in the bathroom.

  The “what if” thoughts started the week after his father left. Before that he couldn’t remember the details of any trip home from school — it was just something he did to get to where he was going. But that changed, and the details became magnified to the point where they took over. Like sewer grates. He must have walked past and over thousands in his young life, but the week after his father left, one in the middle of the sidewalk, a block from his apartment caught his attention in an obsessive way. He looked at the ten slits on each side of the twelve slits in the centre and asked what if he stepped on it and the metal collapsed?

  What if he fell through, into the sewer, scraped his arms on the dirty walls as he ricocheted from one side to the other before cracking his head on a cement ridge and drowning face first in brown water at the bottom, so that his bloated body left his face unrecognizable when finally discovered? He doesn’t walk near sewer grates after those thoughts.

  He clicks on a site titled: 20 GAY STEREOTYPES AND WHY THEY ARE BULLSHIT and scans through the list. Gays throw like girls; gays are egocentric; gays like shopping; gays hate sports; gays are good dancers; gays don’t smell; gays are sensitive; gays like pop music; gays don’t like their fathers. He closes the site, erases the search history, and decides to tell his mother what he saw that day in the bathroom. Suddenly it feels like he should have told her long ago. And as he sits in a daze, he notices every particle floating in the beam of sunlight shining through the living room window. Little flecks of dust that appear to float randomly, but in this light, he knows they move with purpose. He is ready to tell her, ready to share his secret without fearing what she might say or how she’ll look at him. He just isn’t sure how to tell her.

  Rehearsing anything important has always brought him comfort, so as he clicks on a driving video game and begins dodging his futuristic car through traffic, he runs through a number of scenarios, but none of them feels right. If he tells her, he has something to tell her as soon as she walks in the apartment. The drama will stress her, and if he randomly brings up his dad at an unexpected time like when she’s doing a crossword, that will be weird and stress her, and if he blurts out that he saw his dad kiss a man on floor of the bathroom during dinner, she’ll probably faint.

  When his last futuristic car crashes, he sits on the couch and waits for his mother to get home from work. With his stomach swirling more nervously with every passing second, he is desperate for a distraction, so he picks up a photo album from under the coffee table.

  The photos look different now with his dad gone, and he can’t help but look for clues that the man didn’t love his mother, that he was unhappy with the family or that he was attracted to men. But there aren’t any clues. Smiles centre most photos. Some jovial, others forced, but they are no different than any other family album. Pictures of birthdays, special events, and parties, they chronicle the best of times. The tradition with photos is to leave the dark clouds out of these painted horizons.

  He pulls out a picture of his father standing beside his mother in a park. They both look young enough that it could have been before marriage, and with big smiles and their hands entwined, they certainly appear in love. Everything about his dad looks cool. His tan is deep, his shirt is off, and a cigarette hangs from the corner of his mouth. Richard hopes to be that confident one day.

  The apartment door opens and Richard feels the muscles in his throat tighten. The sight of his mother makes telling her about his father real, and his mind begins to scramble for reasons not to reveal the secret. He doesn’t want to make her life worse than it is, and he doesn’t want to admit he has been keeping the truth from her.

  She hangs up her coat and turns towards him with eyes clearly red from crying. Tears offer an excuse. If she is already upset, then this isn’t the right time. Part of him wants to excuse himself to his room, but a bigger part of him wants to get the secret off his conscience. He takes another breath and decides to start with something light to buy some time, something to cheer her up.

  “Do you want to play cards?”

  She looks at him with eyes that burn. “What I want to do is talk with you. Wait here.”

  She disappears into her bedroom and reappears with two large plastic bags. Richard doesn’t know what to make of her aggression. She gets upset a lot, but he can’t remember the last time she was angry. Anger just isn’t her temperament.

  “Can you explain this?”

  She tips the bags upside down, and all of the gay magazines and photocopies of articles from underneath his bed spill onto the coffee table. Some drop to the floor and others drop open to pictures of men kissing. Richard wants to run into his bedroom and pull the covers over his head but she blocks the path.

  “Is there something you want to tell me?”

  He considers telling her the secret just to deflect the attention, but she is so angry he hesitates long enough for her to seize control.

  “Did someone give you these? Is someone touching you?”

  Touching him? The questions confuse him. Confuse and worry him. What she found is research, but she just gave it an evil quality that makes him feel uncomfortable. The muscles in his throat tighten again, forcing him to swallow back another gag.

  She sits beside him now with both hands wiping at her eyes until she leans into him. “Do you like boys? Is that what this is about?”

  A pressure in his head makes him feel dizzy. The way she emphasized “boys” makes him wince. He wants to scream: It’s dad that likes guys. How could you be with him all that time and not notice? This isn’t about me, it’s about him. But he can’t even look at her.

  She takes a deep breath through her nose, and he watches as the muscles beneath her eyes twitch. “Because if you like boys, that’s okay. It’s normal for some people to like the same sex, but you’re pretty young for magazines like this. I can, uh, I can buy you books that will help you sort out your feelings, if you’ve decided that you like boys.”

  The tone and repetition of “boys” makes him cringe. He looks at her in disbelief. He wants to faint, but he knows the only way to stop this debacle is to speak.

  “They’re not mine.”

  “Don’t lie, Richard. I found them under your bed.”

  “They’re a friend’s from school. His dad’s gay and he wanted to find out more about it, but he didn’t want his dad to find the magazines and stuff, so he asked me to hold onto it all for him.”

  “And you expect me to believe that?”

  Of course, he thinks. She wants to believe anything other than that he is sexually curious, so all he has to do is give her a way out.

  “It’s the truth. It’s not his fault his dad’s gay. He’s just trying to make sense of
his situation.”

  His mother’s face contorts into a look equal parts ashamed and relieved. “I want you to give these back to your friend. You’re too young for stuff like this. Way too young. Do you understand me?”

  Richard nods and waits until it is okay to slip off to his room. For a moment, he thought the day might end with a diary entry about telling his mother the secret, but instead he writes: 1) Find a better hiding place.

  Five

  Barrett discovered just how little children’s books have to do with reading two weeks after his first book went on sale. He figured the pseudonym gave him the distance to deliver the manuscript, collect some money, and never be heard from in the kid’s industry again. But when his book debuted at number three on the bestseller list, everything changed. Sitting with the third highest selling children’s book in the country didn’t humble him and it didn’t make him grateful, it made him want to find out everything he could about who wrote numbers one and two. He scribbled down the names: Sheryl Orange #1; Horace Night #2. An hour later he returned from the bookstore with over two hundred dollars on his credit card. Each of them had ten books in print, and all of them wore stamps championing their award-winning status. The Golden Kite award, presented by the Society of Children’s Writers, the American Library Association medal for children’s literature, the Newberry Medal, the Boston-Globe-Horn award, and a slew of lesser known stamps from governing bodies around the world.

  Horace Night has a series called Traveling with Timmy. Barrett cracked open the first of the series, and by page six he tossed it on the floor in amazement. This was the second best-selling children’s book in the country? A blandly written, on-the-nose tour of New York and all its wonderful cultures led by Timmy the turtle and his multicultural friends. He couldn’t bear to read another page, so he decided to try the Orange books. Adventures with Amy is aimed at older kids and stars a curious girl with full cheeks and big eyes, and while he hated to admit the writing had punch, it soothed him to find the allegories were spoon-fed to the lowest common denominator.

  The importance of manners; respecting differences; being kind to elders. Suddenly it made sense that most people he met had the creativity and flare of a white wall.

  They have been raised on books like this, which make life appear to have clearly defined boundaries with rules as easy to follow as tic, tac, toe. He needed to know more, he needed to meet these authors, so he searched the Internet for their next public readings and counted down the days for the next two weeks.

  Horace Night’s reading was first, and while Barrett knew the man’s books were popular, he wasn’t prepared for the event’s scale. A red carpet greeted guests outside the bookstore, someone dressed as Timmy handed out candy, three hundred kids were crazed with excitement in the reading area, and at least a dozen tables sold Timmy books, candy, bed sheets, pencils, T-shirts, pajamas, and wallpaper.

  Two things stood out to Barrett despite the chaos. First, the crowd around the booth selling the Timmy books consisted entirely of adults. Second, all of the kids were standing around two wall-mounted TVs that played the Timmy cartoon. A man wearing the bright yellow uniform of the bookstore approached the microphone on a stage two feet high. He was a large man, well over two hundred pounds, but he spoke with one of the highest voices Barrett had ever heard.

  “Welcome, people. Come get your seats and get ready for one of the most exciting events ever to come to our store.”

  Parents pried their kids away from the TVs and ushered them to the front rows. The seats filled up quickly, and the buzz increased in volume until the large announcer stepped in front of the microphone again.

  “It’s my pleasure to introduce one of the world’s best-selling children’s authors, Horace Night.”

  Barrett expected the loud cheers kids make when they are encouraged to be noisy, but the applause that erupted would have made movie stars envious. And Night didn’t disappoint. Dressed in a Superman sweater and beige slacks, he skipped on stage strumming a guitar that hung from a strap on his neck. The kids clapped and the parents nodded along as he worked his way through a series of Timmy songs, each of them available on the official Traveling with Timmy CD.

  When it came time to read, the room was silent, eerily so in Barrett’s opinion. It was like a classical conditioning experiment where the very sight of a book prompted quiet. Having read the latest Traveling with Timmy, he knew what to expect, but listening to the audience laugh on cue created a brand new sting of jealousy. If he was going to write children’s books, this was how he wanted kids to respond. Suddenly being number three on the bestseller list felt like three hundred thousand.

  When the reading ended, Barrett followed Horace down a corridor. No one asked him why he was in a private area, so he kept following until Horace disappeared behind a door with his name on a cartoon-style star. Barrett looked down the hall to see who was watching. Two suits chatted on cell phones, but neither of them were paying attention to anything else. Barrett opened the dressing room door and froze for a moment. There was no celebrating, no gaudy tray of food or drinks. Instead Horace sat on a couch with tears running down his face. And these weren’t tears of joy; these were tears that flowed from eyes burning red with anguish. Barrett stepped forward for a closer look when two hands pressed against his chest.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I work here. I was told to …”

  “It’s not a good time.”

  The man steered Barrett’s shoulders so he had to turn around and ushered him out the door. Crying? Crying after a performance like that? The sight of an acclaimed children’s author with tears streaming down his cheeks made him wonder. Burnout? Divorce? A personal tragedy? His imagination had just begun to warm up when a bald man with close-set eyes stepped in front of him.

  “Would you like to purchase the Traveling with Timmy video game? It’s testing off the charts with the kids, and it won’t be in stores for another month.” He held the video game box up for inspection. “Your kid will think you’re the coolest.”

  Barrett wondered if the man knew Timmy’s creator was bawling his eyes out just two doors down the hall.

  Two days later, he arrived at Sheryl Orange’s reading an hour early. He didn’t need to see another performance — what he wanted was some time with the author. Not long, just a moment to look in her eyes and ask a few questions.

  There was already a lineup for signings when he arrived. He looked at the row of at least a hundred and worried that he might not reach the signing desk in time, but within minutes it was clear this was an efficient operation. The line moved quick enough that he wasn’t done his crossword before he was next in line behind an Indian boy with cheese popcorn flavouring smeared around his lips. When the boy was done, Barrett folded his newspaper and stepped forward.

  Sheryl looked better than he expected. He knew she was forty-eight, but the pictures he saw of her made her look more weathered. In person, she was a lively forty-eight. Fresh skin, sparkling eyes, and always smiling. He wondered what he’d look like at forty-eight, hoped to still have nose cartilage and a liver and extended a hand.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  Sheryl Orange nodded with a smile. Her marker hovered just above the book’s cover. “And who should I make this out to?”

  “My son, Eric,” he said without hesitation.

  She looked at him for a moment, like she knew he was full of shit, before signing anyway.

  “You’ve done a great job with promotion,” he said, picking up the freshly signed book. “I’m in marketing, and I’ve got to say, this is quite a campaign.”

  Her eyes lit up. This wasn’t the usual chatter she’d grown to expect at her signings. “I have a degree in marketing myself.”

  “Really?”

  “And an MBA. I know the value of details.”

  Barrett nodded slowly and raised his book in goodbye. He noticed her watch, her necklace and her wedding ring. Clearly, she knew the va
lue of diamonds too.

  Sitting in the back of a gun-metal grey stretched Mercedes, Barrett looks at a crystal decanter of cognac and wonders what Sheryl Orange thinks of his sales as the car pulls up in front of the winding cement steps of his publisher’s mansion.

  He promised Sidney he would attend Don’s disco-themed party, and with his shirt unbuttoned to his chest and his hair slicked back, he has kept his word. He steps out of the car, walks up the steps past two greeters dressed as go-go dancers and into the party.

  Not two steps inside, Don approaches. He’s dressed in a satin shirt with disco balls, grey bell bottoms and three-inch heels, and Barrett can tell from the pride in Don’s eyes that the man isn’t just satirizing an era. “I’m glad you made it.” Don brings Barrett in for a hug.

  “You think I’d miss this?”

  “Come on, there’s someone I want you to meet.”

  Barrett moves through a living room set up as a lounge where many guests are already dancing and into the kitchen in time to see Don put his arm around a man with his back to them.

  “Barrett, I’d like to you to meet literary genius Martin Brouge.”

  Martin turns around, and Barrett stops on the spot. Shock tingles through him as he looks at the man like he is the last person on the planet he wants to see. With thick hair, a natural smile, and a face that looks like he drinks more water than alcohol, Martin looks like he hasn’t worried a moment in his life. Even in a baby-blue suit jacket with an oversized white collar jutting out and a number of fake gold chains around his neck, he looks good.

  “It’s been a long time,” Barrett says.

  “It certainly has.”

  Don is surprised. “You two know each other?”